The changing faces of Casper

Children's faces are hard. Believe it or not, these three screenshots are all of the same head mesh, all of the same character. I'm fast learning that you really, really need to make sure that "perspective" is turned on when working in Zbrush, because it can warp your vision of what you're doing to insane degrees if you're doing finicky work like heads. After getting the first head back out of zbrush, I found I was hugely unhappy with the shape of it, he just looked too alien. But I'm fast learning that it pays to carefully use your layers and save your Zbrush tools, so luckily I have the ability to quickly alter the base shape of the head underneath all the detail work.

The third screenshow has an altered chin and side of face, mainly accomplished using the relax tool. I'm still not happy with it, though; it needs a lot more work, and some more collaboration with the person in charge of modelling the "older" version of this character.

Modelling children is a steep learning curve. But I feel like I'm learning a lot by doing so.

Younger Brother: Progress

I've finished the normal map for the younger brother! ....As you can see, I've yet to start on the specular or diffuse maps, though.

I am quite happy with the head sculpt, though. And I think it's interesting how your perspective on "what looks good" can evolve so drastically once you start having points of comparison. The first image in this post is the exact same model I posted when I had first finished the model (albeit with fixed smooth groups!). It looked perfectly fine to me at the time, and was built to the exact proportions of the model sheet/turnaround I had created. But looking back now, his eyes are so big that it makes him look like an alien! I fell for the assumption that to make someone younger, you make their eyes bigger - whereas after some more observation, it's really more about a softening of features.

I'm not entirely happy with the way the mesh is behaving around the lips, though. It's in danger of going into unintentional "duckface" territory, but I haven't decided how I'm going to go about fixing this yet - either by diving back into zbrush, by editing the normal map or by messing with the base mesh itself.

After being unhappy with the first sculpt of Caspers head coming out of zbrush (it was strangely wide, although I'm not sure how I didn't spot that in Zbrush!) I went back and resculpted Casper's head. This is the export of the lowest level of that sculpt, to have the high poly projected onto it. This version looks far more promising than my initial attempts, thankfully.

I am slightly worried that the character's hair is going to look "plastered on": I do, however, have to do some research regarding hair alphas for game use for my personal project, the knight. If I can get hair working nicely on that model, I may experiment on giving this character hair with alphas as well.

I've been building lanterns and props for the last few days. Becoming a little neurotic over sharp corners and chamfers. Where does one draw the line? I don't want things to have edges that are too sharp, but when the props are this small, you don't want to overdo it and clog up the scene with unneccesary polys and verts.

There's a mix of approaches here. The tallest lantern favours chamfering, but the lantern on the far left is fairly plain. As long as they all look good from a reasonable distance, then they're fulfilling their purpose.

Knight progress!

I've just started work texturing this in Zbrush. The armour is complicated, so I'm sculpting it piece by piece and assembling the normal map in photoshop as I go. So far I only have the upper shoulderplates, elbow pads and upper capes normal mapped - this is just me testing out how they look. I'm toying with the idea of using multiple shaders on this one object (one for metals, one for softer materials I can use a phong or blinn shader for) although both use the same diffuse/spec/normal map. I forsee some toying with shaders in my future, but I'm going to concentrate on finishing the normal map!

Just finished the base mesh for my knight character! There are a few things I'll need to go back to: I'm not going to create things that rely on snapping to vertices that might yet move at the moment! Hair, eyelashes and inner mouth are among the parts of the mesh I haven't created yet. Next step is to unwrap this all into two maps (one for head, one for body) and then take them into Zbrush for some high poly sculpting.